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Nkane
Trad climber
San Francisco, USA
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Dec 26, 2014 - 07:31pm PT
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I loved this story when I first read it in the New Yorker. In fact, I ended up buying and reading some other Levi afterwards. I often quote that passage about wine when someone hands around a bottle in Tuolomne or other high places.
But I'm surprised that Largo and others weren't moved by it! Though as someone who's written more any better words than I ever will, he's certainly entitled to his opinions!
And it's a story that I think makes little sense if you don't know that the author endured horrors in Auschwitz.
I think the story is about the way that storytelling, while it brings a community together in a mountain hut, and while it can help you deal with the minor traumas in life, is incommensurate with the great awfulness of the Holocaust. The key is in the last two paragraphs.
The power of the second to last paragraph comes from juxtaposing the experience of "bear meat" - a cold night out, which we all know is no fun - with the narrator's "enterprises... not in the mountains." When you know that these "enterprises" are the most horrific experiences that humans can inflict on each other, it both trivializes the mountaineering experience and gives the speaker a way to relate his experience to the people around the table with him. You can feel this tension in the last paragraph, when the speaker loses steam, loses the thread of his story, and feels embarrassed for having crossed some unspoken line.
To me, the conclusion is a perfect culmination. The speaker is able to allude to what he experienced, but is unable to state it. What he experienced is so much worse than his night on the mountain that he won't put the others through the memory so he goes silent. Levi does the same - avoiding mentioning his own time in Auschwitz by concluding the story and distracting the reader with the mention of the book about the sea. But the specter of the Holocaust hangs over the whole story and to me, is more powerful for never being mentioned.
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aguacaliente
climber
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Dec 26, 2014 - 08:27pm PT
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klk wrote:
So when Levi's narrator says of Carlo dying in the mountains, that he died "doing what he had to do: not the kind of duty imposed by someone else, or by the state, but the kind one chooses for oneself," he's making a political point, namely, that it is possible to commit in a serious way to this sort of calling without falling into Nazism or Fascism. In a way, he's trying to reclaim serious alpinism for those who had opposed the Aryanisation of the Alps. That's why the punchline is so grim: In the end, of course, Carlo turns out to be a fictional character, plagiarized from a popular romance about sailors.
klk and Largo, excuse me for partially disagreeing with things you wrote back in 2007, but I have to quibble with readings of two parts of the text. The narrator of the story within the story says of Carlo, "He died in a way that suited him—not in the mountains, but the way one dies in the mountains. Doing what he had to do..." Carlo did not die in the mountains.
And at the very end when the framing narrator says "I later found almost those exact words in a book that is now dear to me, by the same sailor ..." he is clearly referring to the benediction "may the earth in which he rests, not far from here, lie light on his bones," not to the entire story of Carlo. I don't believe he implies Carlo was fictional in the story within the story.
I read this story when it first came out and it impressed me strongly, both with the compact depiction of mountain habits - familiar to many on Supertopo, but not to Levi's readers; and with the allusions to hardship and trials yet accompanied by freedom, that fall into the category of bear meat. I am fairly sure that Levi's implication is that Carlo died with the Italian partisans in the war.
I had already read Levi's The Periodic Table many years before and this story struck me as a similarly sidelong reference to history and Levi's autobiography. As I recall the characters in the stories of the Periodic Table are often rendered glancingly or in ellipses as in this story.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Dec 27, 2014 - 06:59pm PT
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I agree that it appears Carlo died, not in the mountains, but in the way one dies in the mountains: exposure, untended injury, falling but perhaps from the impact of a bullet. To me it seems he fell in the line of duty, but not duty to state or political party, rather duty to friends and family. I think his death had little to do with separating political influence from alpinism.
But I could be wrong!
;>)
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